A Critical Look at the Phillies Organization and Minor League Baseball
Matt Winkelman 
I have been thinking a lot about J.P. Crawford’s midseason ranking and the quotes from unnamed scouts and executives thrown at him as different public sites went to bury him. On some level the criticism was fair. When Crawford missed 10 days of games in mid June he was batting .194/.313/.252. As is well documented … Read more
I was browsing through the minor league pitching leaderboards on Fangraphs this morning and I noticed that a name kept appearing at the top of almost all of the leaderboards among qualified pitchers (pitchers who would qualify for the ERA title in leagues where they have pitched). This pitcher was in the Phillies’ system and … Read more
The Phillies have a grand tradition of trying to make the slowest plodding players on the field play in the outfield. It started with an attempt to put Ryan Howard in left field to not have him be blocked by Jim Thome, and has continued to this day. Now some of this has been in … Read more
We need to rewind a month here, because I have yet to actually talk about an event that occurred on July 2. The Phillies entered this year with $4,750,000 to spend on international talent this year. We know the end of the story, but let’s go back to the beginning with who they signed, and … Read more
Prospect lists in general are arbitrary things, midseason lists are doubly so. Each evaluator talks to different people, and each person has their own set of biases and values. When it comes to midseason lists, we add in a time factor as games are still going on. I am writing this list nearly a month … Read more
I am not normally one for idle trade speculation or trade proposals. However, I was inspired by Paul Boye on Twitter. Just idly perusing contenders' rosters looking for potential Freddy Galvis fits and hoo boy Alcides Escobar sure has been bad for a while — Baseball Paul (@paul_boye) July 27, 2017 Like usual, the Royals … Read more
Last night the Phillies shipped out their best trade piece in Pat Neshek for a trio of prospects. None of the prospects are going to make anyone’s jaw drop (unless it is the name and appearance of J.D. Hammer). When I publish my midseason ranking on Tuesday, none of these prospects will have a number … Read more
Last year the Lakewood BlueClaws rode a rotation of Dominican RHPs to the South Atlantic League championship game. This year that core group (Franklyn Kilome, Jose Taveras, Alberto Tirado, and Seranthony Dominguez) was supposed to be the center of the Clearwater rotation. They were joined by 2016 5th round pick, Cole Irvin, a polished 22 … Read more
The Phillies have 4 hitters with at least 20 home runs this year, two of them (Rhys Hoskins and Dylan Cozens) are obvious power threats and Scott Kingery is having a breakout season, but it is the guy tied for the lead that might be the most interesting. The Phillies selected Mitch Walding in the … Read more
Things are not going well in the major leagues for the Phillies. This has meant that the state of the Phillies’ rebuild has been cast into doubt. The problem with this assumption is that in the minors that the Phillies rebuild in the minors is going fine (even if it is not going at the … Read more